info;
CHARACTER
NAME: Belle Delaunay
CANON SOURCE: Disney's Beauty and the Beast
TIMELINE: Upon being trapped in the cellar with her father by Gaston.
CANON ABILITIES: No superpowers here!
PERSONALITY:
Belle is a very bright girl with an active imagination and a tremendous love of books. Intelligent and creative enough to dream of a different life, greater than the provincial one to which she was born, she never quite fit in back home. Sensitive enough to be aware of how strange people think her, but stubborn enough not to give in to anyone's dictates of who she ought to be, Belle loses herself in her favorite books as an alternative to being lonely. She best loves fairy tales, romantic yarns, and adventure stories, the kind of tall tales that a dreamer's mind like hers can fall into easily, but she will give any book a try. It's the principle of the thing, as it often is with her.
Her intense curiosity and her relentless drive to satisfy it can lead her into trouble. However, she is a daring, brave girl. While she may flinch in the face of danger, she nevertheless commands it to come into the light, where she may face it fully. "Brave" does not mean she is never frightened or intimidated, but she is persistent and determined. Strong-willed and accustomed to an independent life, that independence is important to Belle. She isn't a girl who dithers about, and while she may frequently have her nose in a book, she's not unaware of the world around her.
Her loyalty runs as deep as her kindness, but while she is kind as a matter of course, good with children and animals, she is unshakably loyal to very few. Naive she may be, but she's nobody's fool. It takes time and deeds, not merely words, to become a person in whom Belle puts her stock, but once she does, you have a relentless and dogged defender. When it comes to those few in whom she trusts and believes, she has a bit of a blind spot and can get tetchy in their defense. She'd sooner die than leave her father.
Sensible and a quick learner, her sharp eye is quick to find discrepancies, and her clever wit seizes on the opportunity to discover the whys and wherefores, even if they lead her to places forbidden and dangerous. She's naturally perceptive, polite, and gracious, with an eye for niceties, a great instinct for putting people at ease and an intuitive understanding of people's characters. She is skeptical but not a cynic, and she's easily excited by the unknown to the point of being a bit of a chattermouth about it. She isn't personally interested in maintaining traditions or in being fashionable and in style, although the fast-paced modern world excites and fascinates her.
Belle wears her emotions on her sleeve, and feels them deeply and un-self-consciously. They can overwhelm her at times, or be awkwardly noticeable at others. Occasionally her decidedly obstinate nature will work against her; when she is bound and determined to go about a certain path of action, good luck convincing her otherwise. Her youth and her lack of worldly experience show, and she doesn't always think through her ideas before haring off after them.
She is ambitious, and some part of her does genuinely believe that she is special. She doesn't think much of "normal" people or "normal" standards, considering them small-minded and unimaginative. She can't imagine living as they do, or fulfilling the roles they would prescribe for her, but she doesn't begrudge them their little lives, because she would hardly want to live them. She regards marriage (albeit to Gaston) with horror, and clamps at the bit under the weight of other people's expectations.
CANON HISTORY:
In her rural hometown, Belle is simultaneously acknowledged as both the prettiest and the oddest girl around. It is her beauty that attracts the unwanted attentions of her town's most eligible bachelor, Gaston, but his self-absorption and boorishness repulse her. She spends her free time with her nose happily buried in a book, the better to ignore Gaston's persistent harassment and what she considers the provincial, narrow-minded attitude of her fellow villagers.
Her father, Maurice, is an absent-minded but sweet inventor. He leaves one day to bring an invention of his to a local fair, and Gaston takes the opportunity afforded by Belle's father's absence to spring a surprise proposal on her, invading her home and personal space to do so. Belle is horrified and indignant at the very idea, and frustrated that no one understands "I want so much more than they've got planned."
When Maurice's horse returns without his rider, however, Belle rushes out to find her father. She locates the Beast's castle, and the enchanted servants lead her to Maurice, where the Beast finds them. Maurice is ailing and frightened, and despite her terror, Belle firmly offers herself in his place as the Beast's prisoner. The Beast accepts and sends Maurice off without so much as giving them the chance to say goodbye.
Maurice returns home, and as he tries to convince the villagers to rally round him and help him rescue his daughter, Gaston cogitates a way to force Belle to marry him after the humiliation of her sound rejection. Meanwhile, despite getting off on entirely the wrong foot, the Beast and Belle's relationship begins to take off. They spend a great deal of time together, and the Beast falls in love with her, though Belle thinks of them as great friends. Eventually, the Beast releases Belle from her captivity, giving her his magic mirror as a memento of their time together.
In the mirror Belle sees her father, still sick, and collapsed in the forest. She finds him and takes him back home, where the cogs of Gaston's evil plan begin to turn. Gaston offers to have Maurice spared from the lunatic asylum he's about to be dragged to if Belle will marry him. Belle refuses, aghast, and in a fury Gaston tells the mob of gathered villagers that Belle is as insane as her father. To prove that neither of them imagined the Beast, Belle shows the mob the Beast via her magic mirror, but this only spurs the villagers on to bloodlust and fear, and Gaston locks Belle and her father in their cellar to keep them from interfering on the hunt for the Beast.
PREFERRED PLACEMENT: (Fisk, Osborn, X-Men, The Brotherhood, the Bugle, Police, Unaffiliated?) The Bugle!
HOW DIFFERENT DO YOU WANT THE MEMORIES TO BE FROM THEIR CANON? Belle was born and raised by her widower father in the teeny-tiny farming town of Minburn, Iowa. Though she never quite fit in, neither was she an outcast nor especially bitter for it, only possessed of a relentless yearning to move to the big city, where she could truly aspire to be someone greater than a farmer's daughter and accomplish something more than a good match.
The Depression hit Minburn hard, not least of all her father, whose real passion was inventing, not farming. When Belle suggested that they take a chance and roll the dice on a new life in New York, Maurice took the suggestion. They sold all they had for all that it would fetch, and Belle applied to The Bugle all the way from Iowa, following her application up in-person with tenacity once they'd arrived in the city.
Not incidentally, for months before moving to New York, Belle was harassed and pursued by Gaston, who was much admired in their town for being a skilled hunter and man of some local success. Moving to New York was at least in part a way of escaping Gaston's persistent and unwanted attention. It was when Gaston threatened that if Belle didn't marry him, he would use his connections to have her father institionalized against his will on trumped-up charges of insanity, that Belle resolved to force her dreams into fruition and flee.
Maurice is in frail health, which worries Belle.
PLANS FOR YOUR CHARACTER: Belle lives with her father in the city; their apartment is a poor one in a poor neighborhood, and their circumstances are as straitened as their hope and industry are strong. She's a rookie reporter, assigned to meaningless minor stories because of her inexperience and her sex (and neither reason escapes her notice). Determined to be seen as more than a mere and token lady writer silenced by the very paper for which she works, Belle is ripe for some muckraking investigative work.
In her own idealistic and naive way, she is ready and eager to fight corruption in her adopted city, the city of which she has so long dreamed. Though sensible and a quick learner, she can hardly be called wise to the ways of the world, and her pointed questioning and investigations should raise flags in the underworld. Belle doesn't quite realize how vulnerable a target she is, or how far people will go to protect their own criminal interests, and her determination to uncover and reveal some inconvenient truths may cost her dearly.
SAMPLES
THIRD PERSON:
The turnstile jams, and that's what tumbles me from my awed reverie at my first sighting of a real live New York City subway station. The decorative tile mosiac gleams with a charm and rough beauty that attracts my eye even as I fumble a nickel out of my coat pocket, hastily deposit it, and move forward, murmuring an apology to the gentleman behind me.
The seats where passengers are to await their trains line the wall on one side, and I sit, gathering the skirt of my dress carefully beneath me, then smoothing the humble fabric over my knees. From my handbag, I take out a little book of poems I found in a dreamy little corner of the handsomely appointed public library. The book and I are quite alike, I fancy: we are both little transplants to a very big place.
The gentleman I have just apologized to takes a place beside me, and I smile at him politely before returning my attention to my book. But he leans over to peer at the pages and says in a tone of some interest, "Emily Dickinson?"
To hear a man express interest, let alone knowledge, in anything printed on paper aside from a church flyer is so novel that I look right up at him. Rather to my surprise, he is close enough for me to see that his eyes are blue, trained on my face. I smile, thrilled. "Oh, do you read her?"
"Oh, yeah. The lady poets sure are somethin'. You a lady poet? You look like you could be." His smile is very jaunty and sure, his confidence a solid a thing as the seat beneath me. He must know a great deal about poetry; New York is a cultured city, not at all the den of sin the folks back home might slander it to be.
"Oh, no, hardly." But I'm horribly flattered that he thinks that, and my own smile brightens as his quirks. "But thank you, so much!" I draw a breath, and before I know it, I'm babbling: my favorite poems of hers, my favorite lines, what it felt like to step into the grandeur of that library for the first time and fill my lungs with the sweet perfume of the books all round me. He moves in a little closer, and I push the book up at him excitedly. "And I choose -- just a throne," runs the line I breathlessly quote. "Isn't that the most beautiful, the most -- the most powerful thing you've ever heard?"
"The most beautiful," he breathes.
I nearly drop my book as the train arrives, but I catch it just in time and slip it into my handbag. "Thank you so much," I say with a quick dip of my head in his direction as I hurry in before the doors close.
He stands, looking startled, taking an abortive step towards the train. "But what's your --"
It's all I hear before the door closes, and I can't take the smile off my face. What a truly wonderful city this is.
FIRST PERSON:
Books to return by the end of the month
Call It Sleep, Henry Roth: Very heartbreaking, very real look at the terrible situation of children in slums. There must be some way to get them covered by the papers.
Lives of the Roman Empresses, Jacques de Serviez: Fascinating, inspirational; get more along the same lines? You can never have too much history.
Suspicious Characters: What an odd book! The final chases were very exciting, but I'm not sure if that amount of murder is quite to my taste.
Books to renew
Sanctuary, William Faulkner: I should have begun this sooner, possibly instead of Suspicious Characters.
The Waves, Virginia Woolf: Reread and re-examine. What a lovely experiment.
The Popular Practice of Fraud, T. Swann Harding: I didn't even really get to touch it yet, I've been so busy...
Books to forget about
The Scarlet Beast, Francis Gerard: I thought I would like it because it was both historical and a romance, but it was as silly as Time accused it of being. I could have been reading the Faulkner instead.
Go back before the end of the month! No more late fees!